The Neo-Right Rejects Liberalism Because It Wants to Rule by Brute Force Not Consensus: A LibCon2025 Panel Discussion
Its slams on a neutral liberal state are sophistic and stem from a deeply nihilistic worldview
Today, we’re thrilled to share with you the full video and transcript of LibCon2025’s panel on the philosophical roots of illiberal movements—including the Q&A section with the audience toward the end. It has been lightly edited for flow and clarity. We hope you’ll find it informative and insightful.
Andy Craig: I’m Andy Craig, and among other things, I am a contributing columnist for The UnPopulist. Does anybody here read The UnPopulist? I hear it’s pretty good. You’ll find lots of good stuff in there—plus me.
Our next panel is on the intellectual roots of the illiberal ideologies we’re facing. In discussing these things, it’s often tempting to think about it as just base animal instincts, emotional impulses. And it’s true that authoritarian ideologies do a lot of emotional manipulation and taking advantage of psychological pitfalls. But it would be a mistake to think these are all just dumb people. The ideas behind National Conservatism, reactionary populism, now all the way out to fascism, have been articulated and advocated by smart people who are well-educated, who know what they’re saying and have deeply engaged with the ideas and have come to conclusions we might find appalling—but it is crucial to be able to meet them on that level and to understand the intellectual history and influences behind this current moment.
So, for this discussion, we have Damon Linker, who is a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania and also a journalist at a wide variety of publications over the years. I won’t try to list them all. But his research and writing focuses on modern conservatism, the evolution of the Republican Party, the religious right, reactionary thought, and the rise of right-wing populism. And you can also find him on Substack at his publication, Notes From the Middleground.
We also have Tom G. Palmer, who is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the executive vice president for international programs at the Atlas Network. He frequently lectures around the world, keeping up a travel schedule that would run me into the ground—but he manages to do it. He has written extensively on political science, public choice, civil society, and the moral, legal, and historical foundations for individual rights. He’s also something of a Johnny Appleseed of international movements for freedom in countries around the world, helping start organizations and supporting some very brave dissidents and friends of freedom around the world. And, for our purposes, he’s also deeply engaged with the intellectual history and philosophical errors of illiberal ideologies.
Laura K. Field is a scholar in residence at American University, senior advisor for the Illiberalism Studies program at George Washington University, and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. She’s one of the foremost experts on far-right populist intellectualism in the United States. And she’s also the author, coming up, of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.
Last but not least, our moderator for this discussion is Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad, right-wing populism, and the world of ideas. In addition to his extensive reporting on this topic in the United States, he’s also reported on democratic decline in Israel and Hungary, and is the author of On the Right, a newsletter on the American conservative movement. And Zack’s own book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, was published last year. With that, I’ll hand it over to Zack.
Zack Beauchamp: Our panel is about ideas—it’s about political philosophy. The first question that I get, when I talk about this to people who aren’t immersed in this world, is: “Why should I care? What is the point? A lot of the people that we’re talking about write on obscure Substacks. They debate on weird YouTube channels. They have names like ‘Bronze Age Pervert.’ How are we supposed to take any of this seriously?”
There are a few answers that I can give. The first is that these people are shaping policy—in a very literal sense. DOGE, Elon Musk’s effort to gut the federal government, was developed with input—albeit not directly—from the ideas of Curtis Yarvin, the Silicon Valley monarchist who developed ideas about, as he would put it, streamlining the federal government to pave the road for a techno-monarchy. And that influenced the staffers who made DOGE. That is a direct line from radical ideas to, for instance, all the people now dying because of the death of USAID. This is not an abstract issue. That’s point one.
Point two is that the ideas that are popular in a particular place end up shaping the background culture of a society. They shape what’s permissible, what’s thinkable, what’s possible. And they define who matters and who doesn’t, who we care about and who we don’t care about, and what people in political life can say. Now, that’s harder to trace than a 19-year-old reading something by Curtis Yarvin and then shutting down the entirety of USAID—which is, as far as I can tell, close to what happened. But something that’s a little bit more diffuse than that still matters. Ideas circulate in the air. They define the content of the world that we live in, and they shape what’s thinkable.
But I think there’s a third kind of answer that we should all reflect on a little bit more, which is why we ask that question in the first place. Why do we think ideas don’t matter? My theory is that there is in polite, American, mostly center-right to left-liberal society, a deeply-embedded anthropological assumption about who people are, an idea that people are motivated by their material well-being, by their self-interest, by, at their best, their sense of care for their community and the people around them. But, ultimately, what matters to them are the things that they can touch and feel and taste, and those things are determined by their ordinary lives.
That assumption is false. We know it’s false. We have tremendous amounts of evidence from empirical political science, as well as historical evidence, that people are willing to fight and die for abstract ideas; that in elections right now, they vote on the basis not just of their material interests but of the things that they care about, on their values, the things that matter to them, their vision of the world. Those stem, in part, from the ideas and the people who are marketing them.
Our country was founded on, in large part, documents influenced and shaped by Locke’s Second Treatise. Most of you, I assume, have read the Second Treatise. It’s not a guideline to politics; it’s very boring and abstract. Locke was a bad writer. He also was a genius. John Locke defines, in many ways, the country that we live in, obviously with input from other Enlightenment thinkers. But nobody asks: “If this guy was so boring, how did he shape the American Revolution?” That’s not how politics works. People take ideas seriously. Ideas matter—they define what people do and how they think.
“Our panel is about ideas—it’s about political philosophy. The first question that I get, when I talk about this to people who aren’t immersed in this world, is: “Why should I care? … The ideas that are popular in a particular place end up shaping the background culture of a society. They shape what’s permissible, what’s thinkable, what’s possible. And they define who matters and who doesn’t, who we care about and who we don’t care about, and what people in political life can say. Now, that’s harder to trace than a 19-year-old reading something by Curtis Yarvin and then shutting down the entirety of USAID, which is, as far as I can tell, close to what happened. But something that’s a little bit more diffuse than that still matters. Ideas circulate in the air. They define the content of the world that we live in, and they shape what’s thinkable.” — Zack Beauchamp
This is something that the political right in the United States—and specifically the radical right—understands. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had at this conference where a young person has come up to me and said, “All my conservative, right-wing peers, people who follow the Claremont Institute, have opportunities for fellowships coming straight out of college. They get ported into the world of ideas.” It’s normal for young conservatives to hang out with Neil Gorsuch. Has anyone ever heard of an explicitly and dedicatedly liberal equivalent to something like ISI, or any of the many different conservative institutions that are now being bent to push people into the world of Claremont, a world where you’re engaging with Bronze Age Pervert and Curtis Yarvin? No, that doesn’t exist, because right now our world is dominated by the anthropological assumption that what matters are the concrete things. So, young liberal intellectuals are being inculcated into a world in which what they should care about is policy design. Policy design is very important. I’m not here to knock that. What I am here to say is that there is a gap, a giant hole, and my panelists are here to fill it.
Tom is going to talk about history, about where the ideas come from. Laura is going to talk about what the contours of the radical right world are like. And then Damon is going to talk about one of the central issues on which the modern radical right comes into conflict and challenges basic liberal premises. Then we’re going to have a conversation. And then you all are going to have a conversation with them. But first, I want to start with our talks, with Tom.
Tom G. Palmer: I want to talk about the deep roots of a lot of the ideas that we’re seeing coming up today, because it’s a recrudescence of ideas that were already well developed in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s in Germany. I’m not just referring to National Socialism, but to a movement that paved the way for it, and that involved many of the leading intellects and scholars in German intellectual life. It was known as the Conservative Revolution. And those ideas are now being mainstreamed into American life, sometimes self-consciously. In other words, the people doing it are well aware of the sources of these ideas. Think about Tucker Carlson—he’s a major source of this, inviting Aleksandr Dugin as a leading philosopher. The man is—I don’t know how to describe him—a crypto-Nazi minus “crypto.” And Steve Bannon, who quotes Julius Evola, a fascist so extreme that Mussolini considered him dangerous. These ideas are now becoming part of our online and popular discourse.
The American right is no longer conservative in some sense that is recognizable from the past. They do not seek caution in implementing changes. There’s no preference for incremental reform. They no longer seek to conserve, establish old institutions that have proven their worth. There’s no reverence for America’s constitutional history. No reverence for the achievements, in America, of eliminating bigotry and intolerance and slavery and Jim Crow laws and so on. No celebration of free enterprise. No celebration of self-made immigrants, who used to be a part of the American story, or the virtues of self-restraint in figures such as George Washington.
The opposite—they seek to destroy institutions, to come at them with sledgehammers. They reject the actual recorded past in favor of a mythical past that they interpret in terms of their narratives. They are revolutionaries. There are no transcendent principles or values for them. They are nihilists. This is a very important point.
The Conservative Revolution was this complex movement of persons, especially in Germany, including many leading lights—Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Hans Freyer—and a wide array of intellectuals with a huge ecosystem of journals and magazines, just like the podcasts and journals and Substacks and so on that we see today. One of the most highly influential figures was Carl Schmitt. He has risen again, not only just on the far right, but the far left as well. He’s a very important figure in driving authoritarian populism of any sort. Populism is a tool for gaining power—it’s an ideology of power—but the content can be filled by virtually anything. Hence figures such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on the far left, who are radical Schmittians. But we also see them on the far right.
I recommend reading Schmitt’s book, The Concept of the Political. It’s the best short attack on liberalism I’ve ever read—highly intelligent. He really identifies key issues. I disagree on every single point of the book, but he’s deeply insightful in understanding the pivotal questions. He attacks the idea of a society of mutual advantage, the possibility of coexistence. Instead, the world is made up of conflict: unending, irreconcilable conflict between friends and enemies.
This movement rejected the notion of a common human nature, a very important principle. Marcus Tullius Cicero, in his On Duties, established this principle that we all have a common nature, that no one is born to rule others. This becomes an extremely powerful document—highly influential with John Locke, for example—and the second most printed book after the Bible, when movable type was introduced into Europe. He had a very clear vision of this common human nature. It became a theme of Enlightenment thinking and has framed much of our modern world. But this idea that there is a common human nature is now entirely rejected. Instead, what we have is irreconcilably different national states or entities that have oppositional interests.
I want to identify six quick themes that were part of the Conservative Revolution, all of which are recognizable today. The first is that modern society is decadent or filled with carnage (in the language from Trump’s inaugural speech), fragmented, disjointed, drained of meaning. That then gets combined with a yearning for a mythical past, with the various privileged pasts differing from thinker to thinker (e.g., the 1870s, the 1950s, the 1840s, or the ancient world). So, Patrick Deneen, for instance—one of the few times I’ve read a book and burst into laughter reading it—speaks about what “the Greeks” believed. I thought, “Really? All of them?” What he meant was what Plato believed, which is this organic unity of society and that that’s the ideal society.
“The American right is no longer conservative in some sense that is recognizable from the past. They do not seek caution in implementing changes. There’s no preference for incremental reform. They no longer seek to conserve, establish old institutions that have proven their worth. There’s no reverence for America’s constitutional history. No reverence for the achievements, in America, of eliminating bigotry and intolerance and slavery and Jim Crow laws and so on. No celebration of free enterprise. No celebration of self-made immigrants, who used to be a part of the American story, or the virtues of self-restraint in figures such as George Washington. The opposite. They seek to destroy institutions, to come at them with sledgehammers. They reject the actual recorded past in favor of a mythical past that they interpret in terms of their narratives. They are revolutionaries. There are no transcendent principles or values for them. They are nihilists. This is a very important point.” — Tom G. Palmer
Hans Freyer, one of the German conservative revolutionaries, wrote in 1927: “For the Greeks, only was there freedom within the polis. And that for the Greeks, freedom is never freedom from the state, rather always freedom to the state. Never bourgeois freedom, always true political freedom.” That is to say, immersion in this polity. So the modern right sees contemporary life as hopelessly fragmented—it’s meaningless. And they want to build a new collective identity within which all of us will find our meaning. It will be given to us. We saw this recently in a Department of Homeland Security tweet of John Gast’s 1872 painting called “American Progress,” which depicts this giant woman in a robe striding forth across the West, and behind her are farmers and trains. Interestingly enough, in front of her are fleeing Indians, escaping for their lives. And it said, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” They’re promoting this image of a mythical, wonderful American past.
Second, deliberation is scorned and bold action is held up as the ideal. This is a very important theme in the Conservative Revolution; in Carl Schmitt’s attack on parliamentary democracy, he said, “Openness and discussion have become an empty and trivial formality.” There’s no real debate. Everything is run behind the scenes by “the Jews” or some other shadowy group, and what we need instead is strong action, an identity between law and the will of the people. The will of the people is to be identified not through debate and discussion and votes, but through public acclamations of loyalty. This is where we find the will of the people articulated. And furthermore, these decisions are made not on the basis of finding the truth, but the truth is determined by the decision that is made. This is a very important distinction. As we heard in Trump’s inaugural address: “We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action. ... The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.” The hour of action. No more talking.
Third, life is full of conflict and dominance—Herrschaft, in German. We want to find who is the superior, and it’s all about achieving dominance. Well, we see this now in the Department of Defense, the tradwife movement that is supported by our Secretary of Defense—the husband is dominant over the wife, the wife and the children must submit to the husband—and Jordan Peterson, in his story about lobsters and so on. In his book, just after talking about lobsters, he said, “It is now your turn to step forward to take your place in the dominance hierarchy.” This is the motive: we want to find where we are in the hierarchy.
Fourth, truth is no longer something like correspondence between statement and reality, but it’s a matter of narratives. Or as Heidegger put it, the unconcealedness of the historical being, of Dasein: “The German people as a whole is coming to itself, that is, it is finding it’s leadership. In this leadership, the people that has come to itself is creating a state.” We see this doctrine also articulated in terms of alternative facts: you gave your facts, we gave our alternative facts, there’s no longer true or false. Now we’re seeing it in the federal government, as people are dismissed for bringing up facts that are not convenient to the ruling power.
Fifth, pluralism is no longer within the nation, it’s among nations. It’s a very important distinction: We will be gleichartig, that is to say, “of the same sort” within the nation. True pluralism is a differentiation among competing national or ethnic blocs, who are each distinguished from the others. This is a very important theme of the Conservative Revolution, and we see it in Yoram Hazony and others. His book on nationalism basically channels much the same idea.
Finally, there is the rejection of all transcendent principles and values. Instead, values are created through acts of will. We create the values that we will then conserve. In this notion, we substitute the old values of bourgeois society—this a deeply anti-bourgeois movement—of responsibility, probity, toleration, respect, dignity, and mutual advantage. Instead, we pick values from a mythic past that didn’t exist: valor, courage, sacrifice, perseverance in suffering, manliness, discipline, duty, obedience, self-denial, Heidegger’s term “resoluteness,” and his more direct term, “being toward death,” which is one of the fundamental categoricals for Heidegger. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, in his book on the Third Reich in 1923, wrote: “A conservative’s function is to create values worth conserving.” Edgar Julius Jung talked about what we need to do as a re-evaluation of all values, “We are conservative revolutionaries. Our justification is this: that one must, from the deepest will to preservation, destroy.” They want to destroy the world around them—they’re alienated from it in a very deep sense—and create a new world worthy of being conserved.
In the end, the conservative revolutionaries were nihilists. And Hermann Rauschning, a very important writer who blew the whistle on them—he had been a Nazi in 1932, left the movement in 1935, and then left Germany—and warned the world in book after book about what was coming. He said that these are nihilists. And if you look at the contemporary leader today, there’s not one single principle or transcendent value in his soul. There’s just the will to dominance.
Laura K. Field: I’m going to give a much more “nuts and bolts” talk, with the aim of getting everyone here up to speed on what I call the MAGA new right. I’m talking about the thinkers today, rather than the philosophical origins. When I use the term “new right,” I am talking about a networked cluster of thinkers, intellectuals, and activists who have gathered together since 2016 and given intellectual sustenance to Trumpism. They are the intellectuals who have inspired JD Vance, are fellow travelers with Christopher Rufo, are the authors of the 1776 report and of Project 2025. And if you, like me, were one of the 10 million people who watched Mehdi Hasan’s Jubilee debate with the 20-year-old far-right youths a few weeks back, then you saw some of these ideas in action there too.
Before I go into more detail about the movement, I want to talk a little bit about the ideas that unify them. I think the best way to do that is to talk about what they have rejected—at least in theory—which is the old fusionist establishment. Fusionism is the name of the governing philosophy invented by American conservatives in the middle of the 20th century that aimed to fuse libertarian economic policies with social conservatism and anti-communism. This trifecta of interests is often referred to as Reagan’s three-legged stool, and it dominated the conservative intellectual movement for many decades.
Today’s new right stands for something quite different, obviously. Back in 2016, Michael Anton, who wrote that famous essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” offered a useful definition of the new movement. He said that three things define Trumpism: nationalist economics, secure borders, and an America-first foreign policy. We can see here a clear contrast with the old stool, and some big shifts.
Instead of free market economics, we have nationalist protectionist economics with tariffs, industrial policy, and more top-down government intervention in the economy. Social conservatism is not on Anton’s list, but it’s certainly still a part of the movement. It is more fervent and reactionary than ever, and, I argue, far more misogynist. We also have a new leg to the stool: secure borders, which stands for a restrictionist immigration policy and its corollary, the preservation of the traditional American nation. Finally, instead of anti-communism, we have America-first foreign policy, which means (again, at least in theory) non-intervention and a retreat from the global stage. Certainly it means a total dismissal of American soft power.
So that’s the nature of the ideological shift, which can be summed up as a rejection of the universalist, rights-based liberal order, and internationalism, and its replacement with nativist populism. I’m going to turn now to what I think differentiates the various parts of the movement.
I divide the new right into three basic camps, each of which is oriented in a particular direction or towards a distinctive telos or purpose, and these visions are often in some tension. This is probably where I disagree a little bit with Tom because—I don’t mean to get super Aristotelian, though they are often surprisingly Aristotelian about it—I think they are all aiming towards something positive: a positive vision, values, meaning. They talk a lot about that, probably more than most liberals.
“Within the MAGA new right proper, the greatest tensions are between the postliberals and the rest of the movement. The postliberals, I would say, are the purest subscribers to the new MAGA stool. They are much more genuinely committed to assisting the working class compared to other factions of the new right, more determined in their efforts to overturn liberal social norms, and have proven more free-thinking in international affairs—more willing to question America’s involvement both in Ukraine and in Israel. I think that’s because they’re the Ivory Tower folks, who are more far removed from the donors and the real politics.” — Laura K. Field
First, we have the Claremonters, like Michael Anton, who I’ve mentioned, and John Eastman and Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College. Inspired by Harry Jaffa and the Claremont Institute in California, this group is oriented towards preserving the virtuous order of the American founding, as they understand it. They generally hold, however, that we have departed so far from that Republican, small-government vision that counter-revolutionary actions are warranted. So, they ask, “Do you know what time it is?” And they warn, “The hour is late.” You’ve maybe heard some of this rhetoric.
Next we have the postliberals, which also includes some Catholic integralists. The postliberal faction in America includes people like Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule of Harvard, and Gladden Pappin, who is now in Hungary working for a think tank there. They ultimately want to usurp and commandeer the modern American state, and usurping and commandeering it is quite different from deconstructing it. They want to redirect it towards more communitarian—at least that’s sometimes how they think or talk—or conservative Catholic ends, as they understand them. The goal here is described variously as spiritual salvation, or the highest good, or simply the common good.
Third, we have the NatCons, or National Conservatives, led by Yoram Hazony. This is a sort of internationalist nationalist association—it’s the big umbrella organization for the new right, and it is a very capacious tent, probably too capacious. In my book, I track the efforts to keep some of the worst actors on the American right out of this movement: those lines have gradually blurred, and the speaker lists these days are pretty controversial. The NatCons line up behind hardcore capital and nationalism. They want closed borders and a homogenous Christian American nation, and that’s because they think that the nation-state system is the foundation of good politics. They talk about pluralism among states rather than within them.
Finally, there is the hard right, formerly known as the alt-right, where we find people like Bronze Age Pervert, Curtis Yarvin (that’s Mencius Moldbug), Raw Egg Nationalist, and Stephen Wolfe, [author of The Case for Christian Nationalism], and others. Ideologically, they all have their own sort of special takes and worldviews, which is why I don’t give them their own camp, because you’ll find some of these people in the Catholic camp or in other camps.
That’s my basic schema. There are also these tech-bro billionaires out there, and they fit in in different ways. My take is that only Thiel and Yarvin are true MAGA new right believers, but I could be wrong about that.
Let me conclude by saying something about the tensions in the movement. How does all of this fit together? The new right is certainly not one coherent homogenous structure, but does it matter that Musk and Bannon are at loggerheads, or that Patrick Deneen’s vision of the common good is completely at odds with the Lincolnian vision of Harry Jaffa or the tech CEO fantasies of Curtis Yarvin? The answer here is complicated because politics is messy, makes for strange bedfellows, and at the best of times is full of incoherence and hypocrisy. But I’d say that within the MAGA new right proper, the greatest tensions are between the postliberals and the rest of the movement.
The postliberals, I would say, are the purest subscribers to the new MAGA stool. They are much more genuinely committed to assisting the working class compared to other factions of the new right, more determined in their efforts to overturn liberal social norms, and have proven more free-thinking in international affairs—more willing to question America’s involvement both in Ukraine and in Israel. I think that’s because they’re the Ivory Tower folks, who are more far removed from the donors and the real politics.
When it comes the right more broadly, there is also plenty of discord. There is the much-discussed discord between the MAGA and DOGE factions, which shows us how wobbly the economic leg of the stool is, and how much sway libertarian thinking still has in some quarters of the GOP. The same goes with the tax breaks and also the tariffs. MAGA nationalists like the tariffs—DOGE types far less so, because they are not so convinced of the nationalist ideology behind it.
Overall, I think there has been a lot of trouble switching out the old stool with the new one. Some are much more committed to the new vision than others, and that creates some genuine instability within the movement and within the American right more broadly.
“My view is that the internal fissures do not matter as much as the chasm that exists between new right types—with their bizarro intellectual lineage, their rejection of American common sense and decency, and their dalliances with the tech billionaires—and normal voters, including normal Republican voters. One of the most important reasons, I think, to spend time with the new right is to understand just how out of step they are with ordinary people, and with traditional American values like equality, freedom, pluralism, and ordinary patriotism.” — Laura K. Field
But it’s also crucial not to overstate the importance of these divisions and factions. It is natural to hope and think that all of this incoherence demonstrates that the new right is ridden with faction, weak, and on the cusp of self-immolation. That would be a grave error. Just because the new right stool is intellectually incoherent or unstable does not mean that it is going to topple over in the real world. The new right has proven awfully creative, flexible, and accommodating of its clashing constituencies. Sometimes, of course, incoherence lends a movement a lot of power. As the political theorist Matthew McManus says: “Being unable to live with ideological contradictions has never been a major weakness of the hard right. A willingness to sublimate and affirm contradiction as expressing some allegedly deep truth ... is almost a requirement to play the part.”
I wish that the incoherence mattered more, because that would indicate a far more genuine concern for principle, consistency, deliberative compromise, and persuasion on the part of the new right actors. Instead, as we’ve heard at many of these panels and probably all believe, we are seeing something much more along the lines of a simple power grab.
So, if we’re thinking about where to focus our energies, I don’t think that the internal incoherence of the new right movement is all that important. My view is that the internal fissures do not matter as much as the chasm that exists between new right types—with their bizarro intellectual lineage, their rejection of American common sense and decency, and their dalliances with the tech billionaires—and normal voters, including normal Republican voters. One of the most important reasons, I think, to spend time with the new right is to understand just how out of step they are with ordinary people, and with traditional American values like equality, freedom, pluralism, and ordinary patriotism.
Damon Linker: Politics, Aristotle tells us, is a contest for rule in which citizens deliberate about the common good of a political community. Deliberation is necessary because different people, groups, factions, and classes within the community disagree about what the good is and how to achieve it, with each making the case for its own vision of the good using reason and arguments about justice, honor, nobility, glory, and other terms of moral distinction. The point or goal of this deliberation is for one or a combination of these people, groups, factions, or classes to prevail, winning the right for a time to rule the polity as a whole in the name of its vision of the good.
But as long as people have reflected on the practice of politics, there have also been those who have mocked the high-minded arguments deployed in public rhetoric, claiming these appeals to higher things are a ruse, concealing baser motives, above all the craving for power and public adulation. In Plato’s dialogues, the characters of Thrasymachus and Callicles, both of them sophists, made these kinds of claims. And we have our own versions of such people today, as I’ll get to in a moment. But it’s important to realize that such claims are both old—expressing a perennial dark and cynical outlook on the character of political life—and novel in the context of American history, especially post-war American history.
One reason for their relative novelty in the U.S. is that liberal democracy was devised in part as a response to such claims. Liberal polities would be based on clearly articulated statements of pre-political individual rights that limit the power and scope of government. They would devote themselves to the ideal of the rule of law, which would be affirmed and strictly adhered to by all participants in the political system, including those who enforce the law (prosecutors) those who oversee trials and apply and evaluate the legitimacy of existing law (judges), and elected representatives who swear public oaths to uphold the rule of law in writing new legislation and governing more broadly. Finally, career civil servants are hired and promoted in a liberal democracy on the basis of merit and, in their work, follow strict rules and norms to ensure that these partial restrictions on our pre-political freedoms, these regulations, are imposed fairly, equally, and intelligently, at least in theory. That’s the hope.
To put the point in somewhat different terms, liberalism seeks to build and defend an edifice of ideologically neutral laws, rules, and norms at the center of our politics, and everyone participating in our political system is supposed to tacitly agree to abide by these rules and laws and norms, regardless of the different people’s ideological or partisan commitments. In this respect, America’s ideological liberals—members of the Democratic Party, as well as ideological Reaganite conservatives up until around 2016—are supposed to affirm these rules as well (which makes them liberals as well, in a deep institutional sense). They both affirm the importance of playing by fair and equal rules.
There are many ways to understand the rise of right-wing anti-liberalism, but one underappreciated way is as an assault on this entire vision of the ideologically neutral liberal state. The first step in this assault is for the right-populist to point to multiple examples of the ostensibly neutral establishment displaying bias in favor of the left and against the right. Sometimes—perhaps often, depending on the issue—that criticism can be substantiated. That’s because neutrality is an ideal, and we always fall short of ideals. That’s what makes it an ideal and not necessarily a reality. But if it can be substantiated, then the answer would be that we need reform, we need change. We need to bring the actually-not-so-neutral practice back into alignment with neutrality in some way. So that could lead in one of two directions.
“For the most part, the anti-liberal right isn’t responding to DEI by dismantling it and seeking to impose what it thinks is a more neutral and fairer alternative. Instead, it’s for the most part taking a second path, making a version of the old argument associated with the ancient sophists, that the very ideals of neutrality, justice, fairness, and equality are fictions designed to conceal or cover over underhanded power grabs.” — Damon Linker
First, I’ll talk about one that is broadly compatible with liberal reform. So, let’s say you’re a conservative and you think this institution, this rule, this regulation, is not sufficiently neutral and in keeping with the liberal state. The answer would be to try to fix the problem. If these elements display bias that makes these things less neutral than they should be, the solution is to reaffirm the standard of neutrality more strictly and to adjust how we collectively define neutrality. For example, many American conservatives have, for quite a long time, despised affirmative action and other forms of race-based outcome-driven laws, regulations, and norms, which we today call DEI, because they see it as the liberal state explicitly placing its thumb on the scale in favor of some groups and against others, hence not neutral. Now, many ideological liberals disagree strongly with this critique, and I don’t think it’s a frivolous objection. They believe that because the liberal state was so egregiously biased against some minority groups for so much of our history, recompense is still required. We need to place our thumb on one side of the scale because the thumb was held down on the other side for so long, and the pernicious and sometimes ruinous consequences of that unfairness echo down to today. In other words, liberal fairness and equality require an ongoing act of rebalancing to achieve genuine neutrality. Anything less than that is to perpetuate unfairness and inequality—that’s the opposite of being neutral. That would be, again, the ideological liberal response to the right-wing critique.
So, how do we adjudicate this difference of opinion? Who decides what fairness and equality require? Well, I submit that there can be no democratically legitimate answer other than to say: we do—all of us, not just the people in this room, but the people who disagree with the ideologically liberal response. This is their country too, as much theirs as it is ours. And if sufficiently large numbers of Americans dissent from where we currently draw lines, where the liberal state draws those lines, those lines will and should be moved or adjusted. But here’s the thing: for the most part, the anti-liberal right isn’t responding to DEI by dismantling it and seeking to impose what it thinks is a more neutral and fairer alternative. Instead, it’s for the most part taking a second path, making a version of the old argument associated with the ancient sophists: that the very ideals of neutrality, justice, fairness, and equality are fictions designed to conceal or cover over underhanded power grabs.
The view goes something like this: The state either favors liberals or conservatives, the left or the right, and to believe that it strives for and is capable of achieving some form of neutrality or fairness floating above the political fray, is to prove oneself a sap, a sucker, and a chump. In this mode, the anti-liberal right aims at unmasking the lie of liberal neutrality by proclaiming that, for decades, the liberal state favored the left and its preferred groups, and that henceforth it will favor the right and its preferred groups. Those, according to the anti-liberal right, are the only options in the zero-sum game that politics inevitably is: us or them. Either our friends will rule or our enemies will rule. And this is where Carl Schmitt comes in, because he was the great theorist of the friend-enemy distinction lying at the heart of politics.
That has different implications for foreign policy, where it seems like we have friends and enemies among all states, a kind of war of each against all. But it also can take place within a polity, if you view your partisan enemies as true enemies and only align with your friends, or the partisans on your side. Justice, according to the anti-liberal right, isn’t following neutral procedures and applying them fairly and equally. It isn’t accepting the necessity of ruling and being ruled in turn. Instead, politics is whichever person or group is strongest, using its power to get its way and then rewriting our collective story to pronounce the victorious outcome an expression of righteousness. If I win, justice rules. If they win, justice loses. There’s nothing more subtle to it than that. In my view, this is a big part of what’s distinctive about the anti-liberal right that is reshaping our politics today.
How should liberals respond? I want to close with two brief points. One is that it is imperative that liberals try to respond to this. It’s imperative because liberalism arose, and has always enjoyed its greatest support, when people have viewed it as a useful means of enabling people who disagree about the highest ideals to live together in peace despite their differences. If the anti-liberal right can convince an enduring plurality of Americans that this is impossible, and that the ideological left is just pretending to uphold this political vision in order to gain an advantage on the playing field of politics, then liberalism will have lost its self-justification. And then, at some point in the not-too-distant future, it may well become impossible for us to remain citizens of a common polity at all.
Coming up with a cogent response for liberals is going to be hard, because the sophistical position that many on the anti-liberal right espouse, the cynical position, isn’t self-evidently false. Once again, neutrality is an ideal, and human beings nearly always fall short of ideals. That failure needn’t discredit the ideal, but it will discredit it if its critics can persuasively demonstrate that those claiming to adhere to the ideal are doing so in bad faith, out of hypocrisy, or on the basis of double standards. There is, unfortunately, more than a little evidence to demonstrate that this is sometimes the case.
Beauchamp: My mental model for stability in a liberal polity is roughly what John Rawls lays out in Political Liberalism: the idea that liberal democracy depends on what’s called an “overlapping consensus” on core values. People who come from different perspectives, be they a Catholic conservative, or a Jewish liberal like myself, or an atheist of any stripe—he uses religious examples, but there are plenty of non-religious examples, too—ultimately agree on the parameters and the frameworks for political discussion. I think Rawls overstated how much consensus is possible, but for the purposes of this conversation, some model is necessary, I think. You need to have people speaking the same language, talking about the same values, arguing within a sense that we share some things in common that allow us to coexist inside of a polity.
In some way, the very existence of the ideas that you’ve all just laid out refutes the working of such a model. Rawls talked about reasonable comprehensive doctrines, people who had views founded on respect and mutuality between citizens, a sense that we are citizens who share in a system of cooperation. The [illiberal] ideas [you’ve all just laid out] reject that, and by their very popularity they defeat the well-functioning of the Rawlsian model. If there’s so many of them, then there’s not a small percentage of unreasonable citizens who can be dealt with as the exception; they’re now part of the rule. In fact, arguably, they are the rulers, at present, of the country. So, here’s my big question: How is liberal stability possible when people like the ones who you’re talking about, with the arguments that you’re talking about, wield so much power?
Palmer: I have become more convinced of something that, when I was very young, I thought sounded a little shallow: the Founders’ concern with virtue and civic education. I think we’ve lost that, and we’re now paying the price. Being brought up to think of George Washington not telling a lie—although one doesn’t know whether that’s true or not—those stories about doing the right thing, the inspiring stories of people who did the right thing even at great personal cost to themselves, are no longer part of most discourse. And I think we’ve lost something really powerful.
“A liberal society isn’t just throwing a bunch of random people, cannibals and vegans, in the same room and deciding what we’re going to have for lunch. It’s a discussion among people willing to follow rules, and based on some minimal standard of respect. When that’s gone, and people don’t respect other people, you can’t have a democratic discourse if that group becomes large enough. How do you combat it? I think you do need an active effort to instill civic virtue and respect for the Constitution.” — Tom G. Palmer
A liberal society isn’t just throwing a bunch of random people, cannibals and vegans, in the same room and deciding what we’re going to have for lunch. It’s a discussion among people willing to follow rules, and based on some minimal standard of respect. When that’s gone, and people don’t respect other people, you can’t have a democratic discourse if that group becomes large enough. How do you combat it? I think you do need an active effort to instill civic virtue and respect for the Constitution.
In America, it used to be that you could stop conversations about censorship by saying, “That’s against the law. It’s in our Constitution that you can’t do that.” And people who really thought their religion was the right one would say, “Oh, okay, that ends that. That’s illegal. It’s un-American to suppress another person’s religion.” If you lose that, then you’ve lost everything. So I think that’s a dividing line. We need to return to civic education and take it really seriously.
Field: I think this connects to the civic education question and to Damon’s argument. Neutrality is central; it’s very abstract and hard to talk about. Their critique of neutrality is more radical than even you say, because it suggests that any liberal regime that is rights-protecting and follows the rule of law and believes in equality for different groups is going to have a vector towards liberalism and shape us in this liberal way. It’s a regime in the Platonic sense in that it shapes us, and it verges towards liberalism. That’s part of their critique; it’s this deeply inherent problem with liberalism as such, and not just the current-day progressive version of it. They’re a bit right about that, if I’m honest.
The neutrality of the liberal state has to be there for it to work. The state has to be neutral with respect to comprehensive ways of life and doctrines, but I don’t know about the neutrality of the state overall, because I think it’s liberal. The state I want is a liberal state—that supports liberal values, that is not morally neutral, but rather speaks out about liberal values, is able to articulate liberal values, and is willing to defend them strongly. And so I wonder if it’s not better for us to admit that the liberal state does have a certain sort of direction and inherent moral preference, if only to be better liberals, so that we then are more proactive in accommodating comprehensive ways of life that we hate and disagree with, and so that we can foster those spaces in our society to do that.
I also think—and this is an even more academic point—that there’s a problem in the Rawlsian outlook. Partly because the Rawlsian vision of a neutral state that is neutral between comprehensive doctrines has been so dominant among liberals, the morals plane, the civic plane, this plane of values and normative thinking, has basically been vacated in our schools. I’m a liberal, I do not have a moral project to sell, except for a sort of wishy-washy liberalism. But what do we do with that if that’s true? I don’t know that it is fully true, I certainly do not believe the right’s claims that liberals are relativists and nihilists. But is it true that our liberal neutrality has allowed us to not attend to these moral things that are actually part of liberalism? I think that’s a really important question.
Question (Samantha Hancox-Li): I want to ask you about something that’s not neutral at all; I want to ask you about sex. If you look at the underbelly of the far right, if you look at the Twitter feed of Bronze Age Pervert, it’s incredibly horny.
Beauchamp: I mean, “pervert” is kind of in the name.
Hancox-Li: It’s right in the name, but he’s not the only one. The far right is suffused with pornographic fantasies of sex: the trad wives, the manfluencers, these fitness-politics combined coach guys. They’re selling people a fantasy that if you become conservative, if you become a reactionary, you will be beautiful, you will be sexy, you will have lots of kids. I’m curious how you think this connects to the political strength of the far right, and possibly to their popularity among the youth, and what, as liberals, we can do about it?
Linker: Clearly there is some large faction of our country that is unhappy about a lot of cultural change that’s happened in the world, in our country, over the last couple of generations. Basically, since the late ’60s, that’s where it all kind of went crazy. I would say that my kind of back-of-the-napkin advice for liberals is actually something that a lot of liberals don’t want to hear, which is that we need to back off on the cultural stuff. Stop insisting, through anti-discrimination law and other things, that certain behaviors cannot be permitted because they somehow transgress the reasonable consensus. I think we basically need to allow more things to live in the freedom afforded by federalism, and kind of live and let live, even if it offends the sensibilities of ideological liberals and would offend mine as well. In other words, let Provincetown be Provincetown, but let Provo be Provo.
“Justice, according to the anti-liberal right, isn’t following neutral procedures and applying them fairly and equally. It isn’t accepting the necessity of ruling and being ruled in turn. Instead, politics is whichever person or group is strongest, using its power to get its way and then rewriting our collective story to pronounce the victorious outcome an expression of righteousness. If I win, justice rules. If they win, justice loses. There’s nothing more subtle to it than that. In my view, this is a big part of what’s distinctive about the anti-liberal right that is reshaping our politics today.” — Damon Linker
David French wrote a book about this during the first Trump administration, that this has all become about the culture war, which I didn’t expect 20 or 30 years ago. People thought the culture war is just like flim-flam on the right, that they do it to whip things up and get votes, but really what they care about are tax rates and things like that. And it’s true, the right cares about tax rates and other things like that. But the energy, the fuel of so much of what we in this room dislike about, and are afraid of, in this politics is cultural reaction.
So I do think that the proper response is going to need to be some version of saying that on these cultural issues, we have to not fight every battle. We have to not say that with every public accommodation you have to prove that you affirm certain ideological liberal content. Because if you do that, then the right is going to continue to use that to say, “See, they don’t want a free pluralistic society. They want to make sure every single last one of you Americans agrees with liberals on everything about how to live your life. In the privacy of your own home, too.” And of course, liberals say, “But you want to get rid of abortion and police these things.” And that’s true—it’s mutual warfare. I think, eventually, we’re either going to drift more and more toward a kind of authoritarianism with the right trying to enforce its vision, or in the other direction toward a kind of civil war, where Trump expands the power of the executive tremendously, and then he loses in 2028 or JD Vance loses in 2028 and a Democratic president comes in and tries to use those powers to do everything from the left. And then the right goes crazy about that, and uses that anger to generate a huge victory in 2032. And then we go on and on and the cycle gets worse and worse until we start seeing the real breakdown of civic peace. That’s the way I look at it.
Question (Michael Senters): My question to Tom is: I agree with you in saying that civic education is a way to combat the sort of friend-foe dichotomy that Schmitt pushes and that we have seen adopted on the right. I think that’s a good way to inoculate the future generation against falling down that rabbit hole. But we have a lot of people right now who would view everyone in this room as an existential threat to society. So I agree with you that civil education is good for the future, but how do we tackle those people? How do we exist, as liberals who want to view everyone as a friendly debate partner, when they see us as an existential threat to them?
Palmer: That’s a deep question. One way is to distinguish between those who have this mentality, which is not very many, from the vast majority of people who are quiet, who are following along. It’s those people who I think need to be addressed. You can’t really have a conversation with someone who says you should be flayed alive. It’s very hard to get them to change their mind on that, because I’m evil, and why would they listen to an evil person? That’s the big problem: Once you’re identified as evil or demonically possessed, they won’t listen to you anyway, so give up.
But there’s all those other people who really are a majority of the population. They need to wake up to what is happening. They will suffer from this. Ultimately, it will come for them also. And that’s a very important point.
I mentioned Hermann Rauschning, I’ve been reading all of his books from the ’30s. He was warning people, and he warned the conservatives who made the fateful alliance with Hitler. I want to read a very quick quote from his book, The Conservative Revolution. He says: “That was the path along which we came to the single party. It was that which made National Socialism appear to us to be not entirely repulsive. It was a mistake and indeed a fatal one. But was it so reprehensible or even so stupid as it is usually represented in democratic quarters?” Maybe not then, but now? Yes. People who go along with this are signing their own death warrants, because they will come for them, too. Those are the ones we need to talk to.
Question (Shikha Dalmia): I want to return to Samantha’s question, and tie it to Tom’s point about civic education. What we have been talking about on this panel is really important, because liberals need to self-reflect and self-criticize. And what I’m largely hearing is that the reactionary moment that we are in is right now a backlash to excesses of progressive regimes, or a hypocrisy towards liberal neutrality, as Damon pointed out. But I think what Samantha was getting at was that there are perhaps some authentically reactionary tendencies in the right that are working themselves out right now, and it can’t simply be understood as a backlash to the other side. Maybe that created a political opportunity, but the roots of this go back quite far, and there is actually an affirmative agenda at the bottom of it. So the question then is: If there are authentically reactionary right tendencies that are bubbling up right now, and they are the ones that are controlling the levers of power, how do you get to this moment of civic education and this Rawlsian overlap and our old constitutional virtue?
Field: I think I’m on the other side of this from Damon. I’m sort of pro-culture war. I think we need to fight it, and we need to get in the fight. Getting in there and defending some of these values is really, really important, and it takes courage, and you model that. A lot of these guys talk about Homer all the time, but they don’t get it, they don’t understand. It’s really posturing. I love that stuff, and I wish that more of our scholars who also love that stuff could go out there and fight, and do some of the culture-warring. Half of the guys I write about have their own YouTube channels; they’re giving Great Books courses. I don’t know if alternatives would be appealing to the same young people that we’re worried about, but that would be my take.
Linker: It’s reactionary, but it’s reacting to something. I’m not really talking about the intellectuals that you’re talking about. I’m not talking about Patrick Deneen and Bronze Age Pervert now—I’m talking about the large numbers of Americans who are like, “Yeah, hell, I’m going to vote for Trump. I actually didn’t vote for him the last two times. Now I kind of want to.” Why would someone do that? I say that legitimately, I don’t know how someone could do that. I can give you an explanation, but I don’t feel it inside because it’s unimaginable to me that one would not vote for Trump in 2016, not vote for him in 2020, and then think after all that, “You know, come to think of it, I will vote for that guy.” And yet there were millions of Americans who thought that way. How can that be?
Tom Edsall at The New York Times had a great, long column this week talking about Texarkana, the border of Texas and Arkansas. The Biden administration sent tons of money there. They wanted to turn it into a hub for creating solar panels. It was a great expression of liberalism: “This part of the country doesn’t like us, they vote Republican, but we’re going to show them we don’t care, because liberal neutrality. These are Americans. We’re going to help these people. We’re going to give them new economic opportunities, give them a leg up into the new ecosystem of a post-climate change economy. It’s going to be great.” What happened in the election? They voted for Trump more than they ever did before. It was something like 80% to 20% for Trump and against Harris. Why? I would say it’s about culture, and those people simply do not trust the Democrats to do anything. You can go there and basically give them a check and they’ll say, “All right, thanks. I’m still going to vote for the other guy because I don’t trust you. In fact, the very fact that you care about solar panels makes me suspicious of you. I don’t want a world of solar panels.” How do you respond to that? I don’t know, but it has to do with culture and trying to figure out, as liberals, how to answer that kind of objection.
Palmer: Part of my life’s work is to identify roots of liberty and liberalism in every culture. In Hungary, our Hungarian liberal friends talk about the great Hungarian liberal József Eötvös, who liberated the Jews, a great figure in Hungarian literature. No one is more Hungarian than him; he should be the face of Hungarian liberalism. In Ukraine, talk about the Zaporozhian Host, about the traditions of self-governance. Even in Russia, Novgorod and their tradition of constitutionalism, Alexander II’s liberation of the serfs. Find those.
In America, it means being patriotic. That’s very important, and the left needs to pay attention. American history is not only a history of genocide and war and Jim Crow and so on. It is that. It’s also the history of the civil rights struggle, the abolitionists, the people who fought for freedom of speech and for religious freedom. That’s America. When people give this negative story about the United States, other people say, “Well, I’m not in that.” We need to wrap the American flag, and all the virtues America represents, around the cause of liberalism, and give an identity. You want to be a patriot? It means you stand up for our Constitution and First Amendment. And those people do not. That’s our message.
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Brilliant. LFG!!!!
As a Common Good thinker, I find such rhetoric unhelpful and self-defeating. It employs liberal tropes that lump different position into a category that your own position generates but distorts the differences. Good dialogue requires the ability to understand others in their own terms. As the descendent of the French Revolution, it is hard to take liberalism’s critique of authoritarian positions seriously. It was Rousseau that argued that sometimes you have to force people to be free.